2008-05-22 
 

shake, shake, shake

shake, shake, shake the ketchup bottle
none will come and then alot'll

That's been stuck in my head for a while now, and it's beginning to drive me just a little bit crazy.

Seems to be an apt metaphor for my life at the moment. I put myself in charge of cleaning out my Gram's apartment now that she's moved into a nursing home. It's amazing how easily history will stick to your hands if you're not careful when handling someone else's artifacts. I'm grateful for all the help coming to me from siblings and cousins, but there's certain things I'm willingly going through on my own.

She has neatly marked boxes full of condolence cards from various funerals. Almost all are getting recycled, but I've been reading each one before sending it to the blue bin. As as if it's my duty to let the words live one last time. Random words from people who may, themselves already be dead.

My favorite great aunt's sympathy cards were all rubber banded together along with each and every notecard from the flowers people sent. Each of these notecards is marked with Gram's precise handwriting telling me who sent just the flowers and who expended the extra effort to also send a regular card along: "also sent card" or "no card, just flowers".

She was one for keeping records. There's a boxful of diaries capturing everything from her hairdresser's appointments to the fact that my cousins had egg and cheese bagels for lunch at 11:30 on July 23, 1996. To add to the oddness, these aren't full pages giving all the details for each day, but monthly calendars with all these events crammed inside the box given for that particular day. Everything written out in tiny, yet perfectly legible block letters.

There's odd things you find out when working through someone else's life. A preponderance of turtle figurines has popped up over the past month. I had no clue Gram liked the little guys so much.

And the doilies...there are doilies for days. Sure, most every one's grandmother has a doily or two hiding under the candy dish, but this goes beyond that. As the last living member of her generation in the family, she's inherited the doilies of an entire clan. They sit patiently inside a plastic supermarket bag in the corner of our bedroom just waiting for me to decide what exactly I'm going to do with them.

Labels: dose of mikey, spirit

* posted by me at 1:52 PM

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